Today, the PACER system contains millions of court filings for the federal district, circuit, and bankruptcy courts, most of which are sold at a dime per page with a three dollar cap per document. But content in PACER was not always priced this way, and indeed the PACER system goes back all the way to the early 1990’s, before computers were generally connected to the Internet.

During the 27 year history outlined below, technology has changed significantly, and the Administrative Office of the Courts has done its best to keep up. Over the years, PACER has offered a variety of ways to get court information. These include a 1-900 number, a search service available via a regular phone call, the ability to connect your own computer directly to the courts’, and the websites that we know today.

We have a small update to share today, as we’ve wrapped up adding thousands of historical Supreme Court citations to our collection. These are the original citations for the Supreme Court from 1754 to 1874, from before when the United States Reports had begun. Previously we had many of these citations, but as of today we can say we have historical citations for our entire SCOTUS collection.

One of the coming features at CourtListener
is an API for the law. Part of that feature is going to be some basic
information about the courts themselves, so I spent some time over the
weekend researching courts that served a special purpose but were since abolished.

One such court was the Emergency Court of
Appeals.
It was created during World War II to set prices, and, naturally, was
the court of appeals for many cases. The creation date of the court is
prominently published in various places on the Internet, but the
abolishment history of the court was very difficult to find. After
researching online for some time, and learning that my library card had
expired (sigh), I put in a query with the Library of
Congress, which provides free research of these
types of things.

Within a couple days, the provided me with this amazing response, which
I’m sharing here, and on the above Wikipedia article:

As stated in the Legislative Notes to 50 U.S. Code Appendix §§ 921
to 926, as posted at

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50a/usc_sec_50a_00000921——000-notes.html,
the following explanation is given regarding the amendment and repeal
of Act …